General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

CrossFire (穿越火线)

CrossFire (穿越火线, also romanized Chuan Yue Huo Xian; English title Cross Fire) is a 2020 Chinese web drama adapted from the online first-person shooter game CrossFire developed by South Korea's Smilegate, telling an original story about two esports players from 2008 and 2019 who meet across time inside a game map.¹^•² The 36-episode series streamed exclusively on Tencent Video from July 20, 2020, in the eSports, youth, and action genres.¹

Key fact	Detail
Title	穿越火线 / Chuan Yue Huo Xian; English title Cross Fire¹
Broadcast	Tencent Video, premiered July 20, 2020; 36 episodes¹
Lead cast	Lu Han as Xiao Feng; Wu Lei as Lu Xiaobei¹
Production	YouHug Media (耀客传媒); production cost 270 million yuan (about 46 billion won); four-year preparation²
Filming	Began May 22, 2019 in Shenzhen; wrapped in October 2019 after more than five months³^•⁴
Reception	100 million views in the first three days; Douban score of 8.1 from more than 110,000 ratings²^•⁵
Award	2020 Golden Bud, The Fifth Network Film and Television Festival: Top Ten Quality Web Series of the Year¹

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The drama runs two timelines. In 2008, Xiao Feng (Lu Han) is a struggling veteran esports player trying to keep his team alive in an era when society viewed gaming with suspicion. In 2019, Lu Xiaobei (Wu Lei) dominates the game as an aspiring professional but loses his chance to join a professional team after an accident, and turns to building his own team.¹^•⁶ A chance encounter lets the two meet across time in a map of the game; they move from mutual suspicion to trust, form their own teams, study tactics together, and help each other grow, until an unexpected accident intervenes.¹^•⁶

The 2008 setting is the year CrossFire released in China, and the 2019 line marks the game's eleventh year, so the two timelines frame a decade of change in Chinese esports.⁷^•⁸ Screenwriter Xu Su (徐速) said interviews with professional players showed how drastically players' circumstances had changed in the roughly ten years after the game entered China in 2008: families of the 2008 generation largely opposed esports careers, while by the time the sport professionalized many parents accepted and supported them, and public opinion no longer treated gaming enthusiasm as internet addiction. This contrast between two generations of players gave him the dual-timeline structure.⁸

Development and production

Origin of the project. Lü Chao, founder of YouHug Media, bought the film and television adaptation rights to the CrossFire game and approached screenwriter Xu Su, offering him a choice between a military-themed television drama and a web drama. Xu Su, who had written military dramas including Fire Blue Blade and God Dog Soldiers, chose the web drama format: CrossFire is an online shooter with little built-in story, leaving large room for original writing, and esports had become a popular new profession that could be tied to youth coming-of-age.⁸ He decided to treat esports broadly, as a sports-economy subject that extends into a story about life paths, and conducted extensive interviews with esports players as the basis of the script.⁸^•⁹

The script took two and a half years to complete, with revisions continuing until filming began.¹⁰ Early preparation started in 2016, and in 2017 a large project team was assembled spanning Tencent's games, film, and video units together with YouHug Media and Smilegate.¹¹^•⁵

Filming. The series officially began shooting in Shenzhen on May 22, 2019, with cast members including Wu Lei, Dai Luwa, Liu Shuailiang, and Pan Meiye attending the ceremony. It was directed by Xu Hongyu (许宏宇), written by Xu Su, and supported by Tencent Games.³ Filming lasted more than five months and wrapped in October 2019.⁴

Game fidelity. The game's user-research team was deeply involved in the production, guiding the script, in-game scene recreation, and user surveys, and a pilot episode was filmed to confirm the content matched what players recognized and liked; the screenwriting team also attended esports events, and the esports team participated directly in set construction and shooting.¹¹ The drama built real-life versions of popular CrossFire maps, including Transport Ship and Black Widow, for realistic battle scenes.⁷

Reception

The drama opened strongly: Smilegate reported 100 million views in the first three days, with five related search terms reaching the top 50 of TikTok's (Douyin's) popular search list in China.² On Douban it reached a score of 8.1 from more than 110,000 user ratings, an outcome the industry press described as unexpected for a game adaptation, a category with a poor track record of pleasing both players and general audiences.⁵ It was named one of the Top Ten Quality Web Series of the Year at the 2020 Golden Bud, The Fifth Network Film and Television Festival.¹

Critics connected the drama's appeal to its structure rather than its source material. Wenhui Daily placed it among the summer's most popular web dramas, crediting its dual-line narrative for blending game-world traversal, suspense, action, and youth energy, and noting that it invested more of its budget in research and development than in star power alone.¹² The paper also described the drama as reflecting the Chinese esports industry's shift from the margins to the mainstream over a decade.¹²

For Lu Han, the role of Xiao Feng was received as a turning point. Coverage of his career traced a path from his 2014 screen debut in 20 Once Again, through the poorly received Shanghai Fortress, to a recovery with CrossFire and In the Name of the Law, praising his relaxed, expressive performance as the scruffy, hot-tempered esports veteran.¹³

Significance for the CrossFire IP

For Smilegate, the drama was part of a strategy to diversify the CrossFire intellectual property beyond the game itself, alongside films and theme parks.² Tencent framed the series as linking online drama plotlines to offline esports events to strengthen the brand, timed to coincide with the game's twelfth anniversary in 2020.¹⁴^•¹¹ The drama's premiere aligned with that anniversary, and its popularity became a talking point at the anniversary celebration.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Chinese modern and contemporary drama

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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